Adriaen van de Velde @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

This is the first ever exhibition devoted to the Dutch Golden Age painter and draughtsman, Adriaen van de Velde (1636 – 1672). His reputation was high during his own short lifetime, and he was highly collectible through to the end of the Victorian era, but in the 20th century his reputation went into decline. In the twentieth century Dutch painting of the period came to be divided into a) really Dutch painting, featuring for example townscapes of Amsterdam or Delft, or b) Italianate Dutch – featuring Roman ruins and classical motifs among the cows and meadows. Van de Velde’s work didn’t easily fit into either category and so went into eclipse.

Adrian came from a family of painters, with both his father and brother – Willem van de Velde the Elder and Willem van de Velde the Younger – specialising in seascapes. Adrian broke with family tradition by concentrating on landscapes and also on human figures: in his short life he became well-known for his figure drawings and paintings – the catalogue claims he had ‘the greatest gift for drawing figures of any 17th century Dutch artist’. Thus he wasoften asked to paint the figures in other artists’ landscape paintings.

The exhibition features about 20 of the 170 paintings credited to van de Velde, alongside some 40 drawings, brought together from over 20 lending institutions and private collections. As usual it is spread across the Dulwich Gallery’s six exhibition rooms.

Room one features a selection of van der Velde’s landscapes to introduce you to themes and feel – most notably a series of paintings of the beach at Scheveningen, made when he was in his early twenties.

Surveying the room as a whole you get a sense of big blue skies, happy cumulus clouds, and then begin to enjoy the details. In The beach at Scheveningen I was taken with the birds silhouetted against the cloud centre-left, and a clutter of starfishes at the feet of the figure bottom-right. The curator made a point of emphasising the proto-romantic aspect of the figure with his hands behind his back, as if he’s looking out at a boundless expanse. Other beach paintings include:

I liked the dog centre foreground, mooching at some bones. And the way the whole foreground is in shadow. Light, daylight, the play of light, light on clouds, shadows, the sunset shades of evening light – these were abiding interests of his short career. Other landscapes in room one include:

Restful. Peaceful. Tranquil. Although there are animals, and sometimes depicted bounding and leaping, nothing disturbs the tranquil light playing on almost static figures, frozen in time. They are like paintings to meditate to.

Room two is devoted to a painting of a rural hut, with a woman working outside and some sheep sitting placidly – an image of man in peaceful harmony with animals and the surrounding landscape.

The Hut by Adriaen van de Velde (1671) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

This painting was chosen for a room of its own because, by a chance of history, quite a few preparatory sketches survive for it, giving us a rare insight into the working practice of a 17th century artist. There are two or three sketches of the hut itself, probably drawn on the spot, based on a real building, and done with considerable detail – the final painting keeps all the architectural detail and even the shadows exactly as per the sketches. Separate are sketches of the people and of the sheep and cattle.

It’s striking to learn that van der Velde used the pose and clothes of this figure in more than one painting: the room contains another painting, of a completely different location and setting, but featuring the same woman in the same pose. Striking to learn that the painters worked up ‘stock figures’ for use in different compositions.

Room three is devoted to more sketches. Here and in some other rooms I found myself strongly attracted to the preparatory sketches in red chalk, black chalk, or pen and ink. The final version of The Hut (above) is kind of finished, dark and saturated – whereas the sketches for it have a lightness and airiness more like the famous beach paintings. Thus I liked the combination of amazing detail and draughtsmanship, with a sense of openness and freedom and opportunity, given by a sketch like Herdsman and herdswoman with livestock by a stream.

Herdsman and herdswoman with livestock by a stream by Adriaen van de Velde. Pen in brown and black grey wash. Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands

In fifteen years he experimented and tried numerous genres, never departing far from landscape but trying out figures and ideas.

The commentary points out that the reclining shepherd, ‘in its elegance and exquisite use of red chalk prefigures the work of eighteenth-century French artists such as Antoine Watteau and François Boucher’.

But some of these sketches highlighted for me his most noticeable weakness, which is his inability to do faces – the heads are often too small for the bodies, and if they’re in any other pose than full frontal, they often look contorted. This is another reason why the sketches like Herdsman (above) have an edge over the paintings – they don’t even try to do features, they are happy to be indicative of faces, and so they work better.

Room four brings together religious works and finished drawings. Van de Velde married a Roman Catholic, which wasn’t illegal, but they didn’t publicise the fact – and there is a small religious strand in his work. Which I didn’t like.

(In this room the curator who showed us round was keen to single out Summer landscape with wheatfield (1662) as a very experimental work – done entirely in watercolour without a trace of pen, obviously on location in the open air, centuries ahead of the Impressionists.)

Room five focused on pastoral works. The curator explained that in the 1660s van der Velde focused almost exclusively on this type of painting, probably because there was good money in it. What documentation we have for van der Velde includes lots of correspondence about debts and loans. He seems to have been harassed by money troubles. Hence lots of saleable landscapes.

Figures in a deer park by Adriaen van de Velde (c. 1665) Oil on panel. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Edward and Sally Speelman Collection

Apart from the interest in human figures, which is what brings the scenes alive – what struck me is how many of them are painted at sunset, with the sunny blue skies and white clouds tinged with crepuscular pink. This was particularly obvious in the only two van der Velde paintings which featured winter scenes and the kind of ice-bound festivities we are so used to from scores of Dutch Golden Age painters.

These monsters fetched big money in subsequent centuries but The portrait of a couple, in particular, to me, shows the weakness of his face painting, a weakness less exposed in the fabulous beach paintings and not called into question in his lovely pen or chalk sketches.

The whole show radiates an atmosphere of deep calm, tranquility, peace and harmony. This is a wonderful exhibition which is difficult to tear yourself away from…